Contributors

Issue 4 – Fall 2015

Joe Balaz writes in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai’i Creole English) and in American-English. He editedHo’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature. Some of his recent Pidgin writing has appeared in Otoliths, Snorkel, Juked, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Revolution John, among others. Balaz is an avid supporter of Hawaiian Islands Pidgin writing in the expanding context of World Literature. He presently lives in Ohio.

Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 40 journals and magazines, including Grist, Kenning Journal, Pank, and Smartish Pace. His first chapbook, How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water, won the Exact Change Press Chapbook Contest in 2014. A full-length collection, Psalmandala, was published later that year. Another chapbook, Harbor Mandala, is forthcoming in July of 2015. Visit http://www.notthatmichaelcollins.com/ for more.

Mitch Earleywine was born in California, grew up in Missouri, and currently teaches at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His poetry has appeared in Columbia Review and his non-fiction has been published by Oxford University, Springer, and Hogrefe.

Tasha Graff used to live in Barcelona, Spain but now she lives in Portland, Maine, where she teaches English. Her poetry has appeared in such places as Word Riot, Epigraph Magazine and From the Fishouse. Her latest projects include writing poems about wrens and learning the uke.

David Hargreaves is a poet/linguist living in Oregon. Most recently, he translated a collection of poems, “The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets,” by Nepal Bhasa poet Durga Lal Shrestha, which was published in Kathmandu in the fall of 2014.

Dr. Emory D. Jones is an English teacher who has taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama, for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for three years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for two years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He joined the Mississippi Poetry Society, Inc. in 1981 and has served as President of this society. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by this society in 2015. He has over two hundred and thirty-five publishing credits.

Nick Hilbourn lives and works near Philadelphia. He writes columns and articles for Defenestration, Pointsincase.com and headstuff.org. He blogs at largethingslargerthings.tumblr.com.

Melissa Leighty used to live in Portland, but now she lives in Barcelona, where she is a freelance writer. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Salt, Colloquium, and English Journal. Her latest projects include a book imprint and a cookbook about Catalan cuisine.

Duane Locke’s poem that appears in this issue is his 7000th poetry publication. He has 33 books of poems published including Visions and Terrestrial Illuminantions, Second Selection from Kind of Hurricane Press, forthcoming in 2015. My main book publication is Duane Locke, The First Decade (Bitter Oleander Press, 1968-1978).

Ross Losapio is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as Lead Associate Editor for Blackbird. His poetry appears in Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the minnesota review, The Emerson Review, and elsewhere.

Ken McKeon is a retired teacher and active poet living in Berkeley. He has been writing verse for most of his life. published two books: Winter Man and Spring Equinox, studied with Thom Gunn and Josephine Miles at UC Berkeley, also served as Miss Miles’ T.A., and was a founding member of the Rhymer’s Club. He presently teach meditative inquiry at Berkeley’s Nyingma Institute.

E.T. Milkton writes from the clouds beyond the horizon. He enjoys hiking, fishing and eating meat.

Ottilie Mulzet has been published in The Missing Slate, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Muse, Morphrog, and Sand Journal, among others, and will be forthcoming in the Beloit Poetry Journal.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press, and the author of a collection of shorter poems, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015). He has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich),The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Representations,Magma(UK), Iota (UK), Bateau, Main Street Rag, Fulcrum, etc. His poems have appeared online in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Thunderdome, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, etc. He is currently adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University.

Ana Prundaru is a visual artist, writer and translator, who lives a stone’s throw away from the birthplace of milk chocolate. Her work is forthcoming in Litro Magazine, 3 AM Magazine and Rattle. She has a photo blog athttps://socksinflipflops.wordpress.com/.

Cathryn Shea’s poetry is forthcoming in Absinthe and Permafrost, and has appeared in MARGIE, Gargoyle,Blue Fifth Review, Quiddity, Sierra Nevada Review, Soundings East, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Cathryn’s chapbook, Snap Bean, was released in 2014 by CC.Marimbo of Berkeley. She was a merit finalist for the Atlanta Review 2013 International Poetry Competition. Cathryn is included in the 2012 anthology “OpentoInterpretation: Intimate Landscape.” In 2004, she won the Marjorie J. Wilson Award judged by Charles Simic. Cathryn served as editor for Marin Poetry Center Anthology,and worked as a principal technical writer at Oracle.

Judith Skillman’s new book is House of Burnt Offerings from Pleasure Boat Studio. The author of fifteen collections of poetry, her work has appeared in J Journal, Tampa Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Poetry, and other journals. Awards include grants from the Academy of American Poets and Washington State Arts Commission. Skillman taught in the field of humanities for twenty-five years, and has collaboratively translated poems from Italian, Portuguese, and French. Currently she works on manuscript review. Visit www.judithskillman.com

Amir A. Tarr is completing his M.D. at University of Miami with a focus on psychiatry and gender identity. He received an M.S. in bioethics from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a B.S. in psychology from UW-Madison. His poetry and fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, One Throne Magazine, Rust+Moth, The NewerYork, and elsewhere. His work in the field of medical humanities has been featured in the The American Journal of Psychiatry, Academic Psychiatry, Medical Encounter, Neurology, Psychoanalytical Perspectives, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and JGIM.

Issue 3 – Summer 2015

Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of “The Chapbook “(Curbside Splendor, 2011) and “Love Poems “(Kelsay Books, 2014). His work was described by the Huffington Post as “not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them.” He is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida. “Thunder, Lightning” is the closing poem of his WIP, “The Ends Of The Earth.”

DeMisty D. Bellinger teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many places, most recently in Driftless Review and Specter Magazine. Her short-short “Tiger Free Days,” first published in WhiskeyPaper, is on the Wigleaf’s Top 50 Short Fictions of 2014. DeMisty lives in Massachusetts with her husband and twin daughters.

Isaac Black, an MFA graduate of Vermont College, has work published or forthcoming in journals like the Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, Fjords, Poetry Quarterly, Boston Literary, Bop Dead City (interview), San Pedro River Review and Spillway. Founder of a major 501(c) college help organization, he’s been awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks Literary Award for fiction and Broadside Press Award for poetry. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he’s also been a recipient of poetry fellowships from the New York State Creative Artists Service Program (CAPS) and New York Foundation of the Arts. Isaac’s the author of the African American Student’s College Guide (John Wiley & Sons).

Jim Davis is an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in Wisconsin Review, Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Contemporary American Voices, among many others. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he reads for TriQuarterly and edits North Chicago Review.

Allen Forrest is a graphic artist and painter born in Canada and bred in the U.S. He has created cover art and illustrations for literary publications and books. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University’s Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation’s permanent art collection. Forrest’s expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Big MuddyandSpindrift with work upcoming in South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Sanskrit and Louisiana Literature.

Alicia Hoffman is originally from Pennsylvania, but now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of “Like Stardust in the Peat Moss”(Aldrich Press, 2013), her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Tar River Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, Camroc Press Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Tom Holmes is the founding editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose, and in July 2014, he also co-founded RomComPom: A Journal of Romantic Comedy Poetry. He is also author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013 and was released in 2014. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.

Robert S. King, a native Georgian, now lives in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Atlanta Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press, 2014) and Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014). Robert’s work has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of Net award. He is currently editor-in-chief of Kentucky Review, www.kentuckyreview.org.

Maureen Kingston’s poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in B O D Y, Gargoyle, Gravel, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, The Screaming Sheep, So to Speak, Stoneboat, Terrain.org, and Verse Wisconsin. A few of her pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.

Christina Murphy’s poetry is an exploration of consciousness as subjective experience, and her poems appear in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including, PANK, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and the anthologies From the Roaring Deep: A Devotional in Honor of Poseidon and the Spirits of the Sea, The Great Gatsby Anthology, and Remaking Moby-Dick. Her work has been nominated multiples times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net anthology.

Devin Murphy‘s recent work appears in The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, andShenandoah as well many other literary journals and anthologies. He holds an MFA from Colorado State University, a Creative Writing PhD from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bradley University.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Writing for six years, his work has appeared in more than a thousand publications including The Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Roanoke Review, The Red Cedar ReviewandCrannog. He has poems forthcoming in The William and Mary Review, Sugar House Review, Plainsongs, Free State ReviewandMilkfist.

Matthew Wilson has had over 150 appearances in such places as Horror Zine, Star*Line, Spellbound, Illumen, Apokrupha Press, Gaslight Press,Sorcerers Signal and many more. He is currently editing his first novel and can be contacted on twitter @matthew94544267.

Huda Zavery, is 16 years old, from Toronto, Ontario. She is a published poet and novelist, and her book “The Art of Letting Go” is available at Lulu.com.

Issue 2 – Spring 2015

Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She is currently a Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. Allen gives readings and teaches workshops throughout the US. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, from John Gosslee Books (2012) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Visit www.kelli-allen.com.

Joe Balaz lives in Ohio. His poems have appeared in Pittsburgh Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, and Hawai’i Review, among others. He edited Ho’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.

Franklin K.R. Cline’s poems have been featured in Banango Street, Matter, Oyez Review andWord Riot. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. He lives in Milwaukee with three cats and his wife, Rachel Kincaid.

Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. A Chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as Cordite, Cortland Review, Reed, Southern Review, Roanoke Review, Green Silk Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic, Canadian Dimension, and others.

Ray Holmes is a graduate of the MFA program at University of MO-St. Louis. He teaches writing in St. Louis, where he lives with his wife and two cats. His work has appeared in Architrave Press, Chariton Review, Dialogist, Midwestern Gothic, Nat. Brut, Thin Air, and other journals.

Nina Kossman is a Moscow born translator, poet, writer, and playwright. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture and Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, she is the author of two books of poems in Russian and English as well as the translator of two volumes of Marina Tsvetaevas’s poetry. Her other publications include Behind the Border (HarperCollins,1994) and Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Peter G. Res is a poet, teacher, and musician from New Jersey. He is a graduate of the New England College MFA program in Poetry, where he studied under Ilya Kaminsky. His first, full length collection of poems is forthcoming from A…P Press, April 2015. Previous chapbooks include: Neon Soliloquies (Erbacce, 2011, UK), Smoke and the South (Nassaice, 2010), and Vibrant Ghost (Differentia Press, 2009, ebook). Res is currently Adjunct Professor of English at SUNY–Westchester Community College. For more, see https://sunywcc.academia.edu/PeterRes.

James Sanders is a member of the Atlanta Poets Group, a writing and performing collective. His most recent book is Goodbye Public and Private (BlazeVox). His book, Self-Portrait in Plants, is forthcoming in 2015 from Coconut Books. The University of New Orleans Press also recently published the group’s An Atlanta Poets Group Anthology: The Lattice Inside.

M.A. Schaffner has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collectionThe Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.

Carol Shillibeer lives on the west coast of Canada. Her publication list and contact information is at carolshillibeer.com.

Judith Skillman’s new collection is House of Burnt Offerings from Pleasure Boat Studio. Her work has appeared in Tampa Review, Poetry Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has taught Humanities at many colleges and universities and has collaboratively translated poems from Italian, Portuguese, and French. Visit www.judithskillman.com.

Issue 1 – Winter 2015

J. Bradley is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals including decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), and the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer. He is curator of the Central Florida reading series There Will Be Words and lives at iheartfailure.net.

Jim Davis is an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in Wisconsin Review, Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, Midwest Quarterly and Contemporary American Voices, among many others. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he reads for TriQuarterly and edits North Chicago Review.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

John Michael Flynn, a resident of central Virginia, is currently an English Language Fellow with the US State Department, teaching English in Khabarovsk, Russia. His most recent poetry collection is Keepers Meet Questing Eyes (Leaf Garden Press, 2014). Find him on the web at www.basilrosa.com.

John Grey is an Australian born poet. Recently published in Paterson Literary Review, Southern California Review and Natural Bridge with work upcoming in New Plains Review, Leading Edge and Louisiana Literature.

Luther Hughes is an undergraduate poetry student at Columbia College Chicago. His works have appeared in Espial, The Voices Project, Howl and MUSED Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

Kathryn Hujda is a performing artist and keeper of cultural memory working in the Twin Cities. Her poems have appeared in Stone Path Review and Hermeneutic Chaos Journal.

Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a previous century, he attended a one-room country school, spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower and published poems in Poetry Northwest and Kayak. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse and Berkeley Poetry Review.

Allan Kaplan spends much daytime alone writing and revising, or watching endless late night movies with his wife. His books include Paper Airplane (Harper & Row) and Like One of Us (Untitled). His poems appeared in journals of various persuasions over the years; i.e. Poetry, Apalachee Quarterly, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Washington Square Review, Barrow Street, Wind, Folio, Gulf Stream, Widener Review, Nimrod and Bad Penny Review.

Graam Liu is a writer, composer, and filmmaker living in New York City. He enjoys eating mysterious food when he is not tickling the ivories, or watching Captain Kirk get the babes on Star Trek. He thanks his family and friends for laughing through life with him.

Janet McCann is a crone poet who has been teaching creative writing at Texas A&M since 1969. Journals publishing her work include Kansas Quarterly, Parnassus, Nimrod, Sou’Wester, Christian Century, Christianity And Literature, New York Quarterly, Tendril, Poetry Australia, and Mccall’s, among many others. She is a 1989 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship winner and Professor of English. Her most recent collection is The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press, 2013).

Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthology Good Poems, American Places. He is author of thechapbook Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press, 2010) and the novel Knight Prisoner (Vagabondage Press, 2014). He has another novel, A Book of Lost Songs, forthcoming from Wild Child Publishing and a book, This Twilight World, forthcoming from Popcorn Press. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the filmmaker Joan Juster.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He has a wife, Vickie and a daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications. He has poems forthcoming in the Roanoke Review, The Alembic and Milkfist.

Frederick Pollack is author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press, and author of a collection of poems, A Poverty Of Words, forthcoming from Prolific Press. He is also adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University and has many poems in print and online journals. Poetics: neither navelgazing mainstream nor academic pseudo-avant-garde.

Thomas Swiss is author of two books of poems, Measure and Rough Cut. He is the editor or co-editor of books on popular music, including Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (U Minnesota, 2009), as well as books on new media literature, including New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (MIT Press, 2006).

Ekaterina Vasilyeva is an independent photographer from St. Petersburg, Russia, and works at the intersection of the genre, documentary and art photography. She has collaborated with the Russian magazine Nevskoe Vremia and the Chinese magazine Civilization. She can be found at www.ekaterinavasilyeva.ru.

Roger Williams lives an hour north of San Francisco where he taught French at San Francisco State University until retirement in 1987. Before, he studied poetry with Roethke and Bogan and, for some forty years, set poems to music–Wilde, Patchen, Creeley, Merwin and others. Now he writes poems, but he does not set them to music. His poetry appears in: UDP 6×6 #25, and a broadside, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Counterexample Poetics, Otoliths #26, #31, #33, Ygdrasil, Eskimopi, Mu mu magazine, Ditch.